


Year Zero

by graspthesanity



Series: C. Year Zero [1]
Category: Marilyn Manson (Band), Nine Inch Nails (Band), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:33:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23394076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graspthesanity/pseuds/graspthesanity
Summary: This is the end of the world for sure.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren, Marilyn Manson/Trent Reznor, Trent Reznor/Kylo Ren
Series: C. Year Zero [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684438
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

“They cut off the lips”

I drop my cigarette. I grab the ginger by the collar and slam him against the wall, where all the portraits, all those pencil-drawn doodles of the same looking man with one eye missing, sometimes right, sometimes left, are on. One month he was without eyes.

“What the fuck do you mean they cut off the lips?” I slam him again. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY FUCKING CUT OFF THE LIPS?”

Detective Bowie doesn´t say anything and watches both me and Armitage, while chewing on the edge of his pencil. His eye resembles a lost moon, even since he became blind and cancer started rotting his organs away. But he still comes into work, once whispering to me, while leaning out of the highest building, a cigarette lighter in two fingers to pass to me.

“I’ll die trying… And you’ll finish it.” It made no sense.

But now C. was spreading at an alarming speed. We were fighting with pawns, not seeing the opponent’s chess piece. Bowie coughed and turned on the telly to show us people burning themselves, saying that it was for the good of the planet and I stopped, sniffing, wondering how long my marine training would prevent my own fucking death. I wasn’t that healthy, no one was now. We’ve all been exposed to the fast-growing virus. It grew from the inside, releasing its roots into the ground, that’s why some burned themselves… For the greater good of the planet.

I fucking hated the greater good of the planet.

I hated God.

There was no point… If he was out there.

I pressed Armitage harder and spat my blood in his face. Possibly contaminated. 35%.

“What the hell, Kylo? Hold your fucking-“ I slammed my fist into his cheek, until he fell and yelped like a puppy.

“Fired!” I screamed.

I walked out, Bowie didn’t even bother to follow me.

Deserted streets.

Is this the year Zero we all deserved?

I had a sketch on my phone wallpaper.

“I’ve seen him”, a hobo said as I rode the subway, he also had a different set of eyes but they seemed fake, as if he was trying to imitate being ill.

“Who…” I trailed off, but it was clear that we were talking about patient zero, Trent Reznor.

He swung around the pole, his long dark red hair falling into different places of his exposed body, like an angel of death.

I wouldn’t describe the world even if I were paid to do it. I looked around.

“He’s God.” And an ugly toothless laughter followed. “That’s why you don’t want him… Who would want a God… like him?”

The hobo looked at me, naked, ragged clothing.

“He was my lover… see? We lived in two republics… He told me he, he started this thing. I thought he was crazy.” Hobo laughs. “We shared the smoke of crack, nearly throwing crack pipes at each other and one day he fucked me.”

My hands start trembling.

“Kylo… I’m patient one.” Cackled.

“So it was sexually transmitted?”

He stops laughing and looks at me all lost and confused.

“Why would God do the same thing twice? We´ve got AIDS… Why not something more fun? To tumble someone else’s deck of cards?”

“Someone else’s?”

Patient one shrugs.

“God is like an angel… easily replaceable…” He barely has teeth now and coughs scarlet blood like the rest of us. “Didn´t you notice….”

My blood is running through my nose and I sneeze it out.

“We all want to be Trent… Talented enough to be God, to make decisions and hold the torch of immortality, maybe some Area 51 facts.” And he laughs out ugly, as the train halts to a stop. He taps his fingers on his lap. “He cried, when he was ascending…”

One white eye and the other black, looking up. Smiling wide.

“Because you can defeat God. You just erase me him from human existence. No typos, no mistakes… Just impale on the right spot and you’re good. Humanity needs a leader. But he was smart, oh hell, he was smart. He decided that if he could be God, then no one else should be God again.”

“The dot on human history, transcending.” And he leans back and coughs, gagging on his own spilling blood. Patient one seems like a descended angel, something truly horrific, something like a counter-Cerberus to guard the pearly gates from the inside. Blood spills onto his shirt, which I notice is stained with his blood and it starts foaming up.

I feel cold steel of a silencer against my temple, as I try to look but instead the silencer is pressed harder with the gun.

“It’s becoming personal… Ben.” An unfamiliar voice says, but I know to whom it belongs to. The first time I saw him glaring at me through a CCTV camera, grinning with sharp teeth like a dog, as he was immersed in blood of humans and fighting his own death to the point that if everyone will be left to die and no one will remember. Then it’s best, other aliens won’t care about books and soon enough we will die. Who the fuck would investigate this much data?

And if God wishes so-

A cold sweat breaks against my neck and I cough blood, but I can´t wipe it, so Trent leaves it to run free. I’m tired, my whole body whines. I’ve been sleeplessly reading about the Devil, but how does one destroy a God? When there is one? He yanks me by the hair and now I notice his short height.

I think of Gogol´s little person theory, that there are insignificant people… Were their thoughts as well? Why did we all end up burying so many male homosexuals and not bat an eyelash to thrash further?

He wants to be important.

I put my hands up and he grabs the suitcase I have in my left arm and opens it, all paper scattering and then patient one goes on fours, both of us really watching him from our peripheral vision. He tramples all the paper, as if CDs or any other means of collecting data aren’t available.

He starts eating it, stained blood coming out, chewing it like gum, eyes rolling back.

“SHOOT HIM

SHOOT HIM

SHOOTHIM” He laughs with his mouth full.

Trent doesn’t shoot me, but he holds the gun against my temple this whole time… Until my stop comes and he tells me the leave. I turn around.

“Killing me, would be making me a martyr… God wouldn't like that.”

“I’m God.”

“We all believe in our own God and you’re not mine.”

“So you’re a fool who believes in himself?” Trent asks, patient one convulsing.

I shrug and Trent steps outside the train, as it passes with a strong gust of wind.

The next day I wake up next to Armitage, as always. A fucking headache and a cramp in my neck, in my temple, oddly, too. I watch my lover. I had fired him yesterday just for him to stay home because of C. And now, God too. But God could reach us anywhere.

God.

I light some incense, vanilla, like Hux liked. He still sleeps strongly, saying it reminds him of a calmer time when you could buy the ice cream and stores weren’t just splashing spam on the shelves or on delivery. Liquor could be bought, and he’d get vanilla coffees.

It´s been years like this because of C.

That’s why every year is year zero, we don’t know where to start counting again and when did it even start. I put my face in my hands and cry, my shoulders holding me together like a tattered novel.


	2. Chapter 2

Getting tested was a dread. It was like a torturous vaccine, where you’d surely pass out and at the beginning we had to do it every two weeks, draw blood which we barely had left and then transfused blood and then lymph and whatever liquid we could produce, like spare change worked. I recall people were still alive, dying, but to my family who were close minded, we were alive. Our perfect family, who cared about grandma? Anyway, I was the first one who tested positive and the last one to remain. So often I asked myself who was I even fighting for now, what was my agenda and people would say America, but in reality… I wanted to keep myself alive. I proved to myself that I survived… That I could be alone against the monitor and eat Cup Noodles with a bloody tissue right next to me. I could be alone. Completely alone.

You took take a camera and zoom out and I’d be there with my small room, alone and only then I’d cry that I managed to get to this stage.

It felt personal, like a fight, a knife fight.

I was stumbling and coughing out blood, Hux wasn’t with me then. We met at the night when I got it. I stumbled into one of those supporter groups, it was one of those safe spaces for HIV patients who didn’t care anymore. They said they didn’t care if they had C. on top.

He was ginger.

I wanted him to live when we kissed.

I wanted him to live when we had sex.

I wanted him to live when we made love.

That’s why there was a plate thrown my direction when I fired him at home and disrespected tears and understanding. That it was my fight… I had coined the term Year Zero, by being the first patient to keep living.

I gave a small speech to some small magazine, which closed not so long ago.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s totally Year Zero.” I had said and that was the mere line of me on the cover, no face, no nothing even if I had made it to the news and my dog pooped in excitement seeing twos of me. Hux and me laughed, noodles and chopsticks.

We were alive.

We had each other.

We were positive.

And we would die against God.

Fuck God.

It didn’t matter. We’d crawl through, some loophole, some…

“You´re the guy on telly!” Some poor homeless man yelled. Hell, we all barely had homes, traded things in for food. “Year Zero, motherfucker!”

And he spat with blood.

Then I hated the quarantine, how glamorous everyone made it to be, by being in luxiorious homes which were eventually robbed. I was like watching a party going on in my neighbour´s backyard without getting invited. It was pissing me off, while I was ill, but Hux would relax me as he would cough blood for two reasons. Weakened immune system and eventually he had gotten C. off me. Which was irresponsible of both of us, it felt like bug catching or chasing, whatever the old term was. I still feel like crap recalling it, because seeing a greener grass never made anyone happy. ~

Now all these homes became squats and people were even stealing drywall, just to sell, to exchange, sniff, eat, decorate any alleyway they found since some houses were locked with simply dead people or trees blocking the entrance, so you´d have to cut through body and flesh.

I don´t think people understood the severity of a death from C. until it was possible to go past the doctors with their lab coats and see the skin stretched into branches, buried inside the trunk and all the organs, like dead spoiled food hanging off th branches and with an errie glow, a wind surrounding the tree, depending on the importance of the person in the roles of life.

Who knew what this all held?

I wondered way too much as I walked towards the interrogation place.

I was somehow scared of taking the train, as if I´d get the same one and as if the same scenario would unfold. If God was here…

He was.

I pushed the door open and a tree blossomed from the chair where Bowie sat. I didn’t even dare to open the bark of the tree, I knew it was him, but there were knives stabbing the table.

“Maybe since guns don’t scare you, a knife and torture will.” I heard Trent’s voice behind me. I didn’t even understand names at this point.

I turned around with the gun in my hand and shot at a wall, which had enough bullets in it already to plant flowers, which would never bloom, all the soil was given to trees these days. Cemeteries and pollen which would infect us with C. But who would kill a relative? Who would take down a tree? Even those who tried would get poisoned nearly instantly and die, making the forest way thicker.

The problem was that when it all started, we were all monitored and then even today we still are, as if its rattling skeletons and AI made to ask us about our symptoms to keep statistics to make sure we were dying correctly.

“Are you alive?

Please answer yes or no

Please answer yes or no…”

“Yes.” I had seen a man say that then shoot his brains out. Just to be an anomaly in the statistics for a day. The numbers never added up, who was dead or alive. I couldn’t understand why he would lie to the numbers, and I still didn’t, only from the other side. Why still count if we were left in what, thousands? Hundreds? I didn’t know.

Sometimes it felt as I were fighting to give a truth to someone, a report with no destination… The people behind it were long dead and the people in target were long dead too. What was the point if you didn’t exist and had no shadow to follow you around? What was the point in… nothing?

I saw couples fall apart and together, because of separate or same mourning, peeling off the bark.

That’s why I still tried.

Because those who still were there, even with no shadow… Someone out there… Not even me or Hux, but the whimper of Earth deserved an answer to why C. happened. Who hated humanity so much, was it ourselves all along or just plain natural selection?

I was happy when the bored people died first.

I didn´t know what reality awaited us and what we were even fighting for.

God pushed me out of the train and I fell behind the line on the concrete floors, scrapping my arm.

“Are you alive? Please answer yes or no.”

The AI’s voice rang in my ears, as I had blacked out and felt as if I was swimming through some umbilical fluid, ready to be birthed again. But where to? Where would I go? I could see the AI’s red eyes, the zeros and ones running in a desperate speed, I could feel myself cough, chocking as if I had been underwater and I woke up to Trent, God, sitting beside me on the bench, peeling an orange.

He handed me a piece and I quietly ate it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm rather tired, but I really wanted this chapter out, so I hope you'll enjoy it :)


	3. Chapter 3

I kept chewing, as if that would drown the poison out, but I really had no idea what I was doing. Maybe this was all a reflection of my fear, but I had faced it. I died before my family, and also before they had known that I was gay. I never had the courage to tell them and now I never shall. Just because there’s a God, doesn’t mean there’s Hell.

“So are you dead or alive, Kylo?” He asked me quietly, before more trains arrived at different platforms as I kept looking around with my eyes, as if that wouldn’t give my curiosity away. I had fear, trampling my blood with adrenaline, enough for me to want to scream and grab my bag and start hitting God with it. How would I even get away with it…

I wouldn’t.

I was paralyzed with fear.

“Can I have more… God?” I asked him and he just stopped eating, his fingers gave one shake, out of surprise and he gave me one more piece.

I chewed it again. I asked for more and we divided the said orange.

I feared fear.

I seemed to be stuffing my mouth with more orange pieces, slowly chewing, Trent watching me not even amused. He lit a joint, which was drenched into some plasma and blood-looking liquid. Maybe it was the C. tests. I had no idea, I couldn’t swallow. Why was I talking to God of all people? Was it because I was patient zero? Was I the anomaly? Was that why I couldn’t swallow? Why was this some twisted game between two men?

I tried to close my eyes, since I noticed that I was trembling and oranges were falling out of my mouth. I was confused by the genders. I was never accepted. There was something in the back of my mind hating my upbringing and the women around me who fussed in their dresses, that I need to make a girl lucky.

I chocked on the mashed oranges and kept coughing them out, mixed with blood, as Trent, God, held my shoulder, watching what was coming out of my mouth.

“Why won’t you die, vermin?” But he asked the question towards the vanishing trains with their destinations all wrong, as if I were in a mirror’s reflection.

I just turned around to face Trent.

“I don’t know.”

It was my honest answer.

“A flood worked before…” He grimaced. “But now nothing works… Humanity doesn’t realize…”

Trent scratched his chin with some facial hair, looking at me in the eyes now. Maybe it was a game of chess between two men and somehow I was there with all the right positions in my mind, as humanity would whisper and the counter was ticking down on God.

“How powerful it has become…” He sighs. “That no one realizes that even my wrath has its limits.”

I blinked, coughing, I could still feel the orange.

“Eat up.” He said and gave me more of the orange.

“Sometimes when you ignore the problem, it grows and grows… Like a tumour. That’s what humanity has become. Let’s say… I go to sleep, but I have insomnia because I hear all of you, I hear noise! I don’t even hear the whispered prayers filled with heresy, blasphemy and pleas to help… To fight C. which-”

And then we looked at each other’s eyes. Suddenly I felt like God was someone as simple and as composed as I was. He felt small and I saw the wrinkles around his eyes, the dark circles.

“Never helped… Because even in death… Some things are never forgiven.” He swallowed loudly. “Because no one is really dead, until the last breath of humanity is done… All those thoughts, consciousness are within me and I carry you all just like…”

He smiles.

“You imagined Jesus to carry the cross.” And leaned closer to me. “But I’ve lost my son… In all this mess. Just like you’ve lost your family-”

He puts a hand for me not to speak on my leg. Suddenly I notice the gray hair which starts sticking out like straw, wrinkles get wider and his eyes get watery.

“Because the pain is within you. Their sins, their mistakes.”

“Why a tree?” I ask suddenly but to no one’s surprise.

“Because you absorb the soil… Everything you’ve been given. Who said trees aren’t parasites? Sure, they give oxygen… But to who?”

“Humanity and every living being on earth.” I complete with the answer to his ridiculous question, as another train stops in front of us and I see the man with the long hair sitting opposite us, inside the train, though. His different coloured eyes now sparkle and he raises his hands up, as if he’s praying and that’s when God stands up and I see no light coming out of Trent, the same salt pepper, unkept hair he had a second ago, remain still as he walks. He thinks to turn around but stops.

He doesn’t look at me, as he says his parting words, for now.

I see his lips move.

“Let me die instead.” He inhales the last breath of smoke from the joint, which appears to be dipped in C. He does one more step forwards and collapses between the train cart and the gap. The long haired hobo, the patient one with now a proper clean shave stands closer to me and stretches his head and before I can look into his eyes, the train closes and departs, leaving me with the taste of orange peel in my mouth and my phone ringing with every possible notification.

I slide the phone open.

God is dead.

**Author's Note:**

> I really just went wild with an idea and ran with it after watching The Report with Adam Driver and seeing the world at its destruction. 
> 
> I hope you´ll enjoy it.


End file.
